See also Commercial vs Open Source | Cookie-Cutter Portals
We specialise in online catalogues or search engines.
If you want a more powerful site, such as a content management system (CMS) or portal, we can build a custom one for you. These are much more expensive to setup and trouble-shoot but are a one-off cost.
We can integrate ecommerce into the site to allow you to take payments securely over the Internet:
Be warned: custom development is 4 to 5 times the price of buying off the shelf. This is due to feature creep, ongoing maintenance costs due to bugs, incomplete specification and infrastructure such as tools, repositories and backups.
Software development is costly!
As of July 2007, we are moving away from custom development to cookie-cutter style as most users have no idea what they want and the cost blowouts and slow payment of outstanding bills puts a lot of pressure on our equipment so it is not viable.
We also maintain and upgrade or extend existing Web portals.
We are getting more and more requests from customers who have bought 3rd party portal software on the Internet from overseas or Australia and need us to customise it for them, e.g. install their logo, improve security, add new features. If you outgrow this site, we can build a whole new system for you and migrate you across.
Maintaining a previous developer's software (the person who developed your site before you called us in) is also about 10 times more costly than redeveloping from scratch due to getting up to speed including reading up and trying to work out what is not documented (reverse engineering and consulting - our knowledge from university and practical experience in the IT and information science industry) to make the system work better.
We will rip up most of the old source and write our own to make the project cheaper, at least 50% cheaper with a much bigger bang for the buck! The site will probably need a data structure redesign to clean up all the lousy system design of the past. This revamp will add much value to your site. New better technologies can be introduced to streamline development and rework the old tired designs.
| Product | Work Proposed | Price | Difficulty | Project Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WWWalker developed custom shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Development, Design, System Support | dear setup, medium ongoing | Medium | Medium |
| free 3rd party open source shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Design, System Support | medium setup, cheap ongoing | Medium | Small-High |
| 3rd party commercial portal + hosting + ecommerce integration | Redesign, Maintain, System Support | high ongoing | High | Medium |
We prefer open source portals for preconfigured Linux/FreeBSD systems rather than Windows due to the high overheads of maintaining Microsoft Web servers and systems over Linux and FreeBSD. Also Windows customers tend to have very high expectations which a low budget cannot meet. Windows costs much more to maintain and upgrade than Linux or FreeBSD so it is not competitive to use for community or low-budget portals, only medium business portals.
If the Linux/FreeBSD server is not configured there will be an hourly charge-out rate for sysop management.
If you choose Windows, we will charge significantly higher rates for project support. This is to cover the extra system support, tools and knowledge required to maintain Windows and .NET software. Windows may be more powerful for middle-tier companies because they have already built 90% of their infrastructure on it for desktop users (not Internet) but more costly to move up to if you go the whole way with Microsoft. This cost may drop as Microsoft and Novell make Linux and Windows more interoperable.
We are going to push on with Linux. Incompetence in system choice is very high so we will be nudging users to Linux rather than Windows to make the project successful.
Users if they are using Web-based systems do not need to have their site running on Windows. Linux is OK.
Most users can only afford Linux. If they still push on with using far more expensive and flakey Windows systems, they will not be able to afford a sysop or DBA (database administrator) - usually a few $100s/year more to keep the system going (server and portal software maintenance), not including the development costs (the actual product).
Linux can integrate very smoothly with Windows and Mac and can do 90% of what a small company wants. Users should think seriously of using Linux over Windows and break the stalemate of costs vs benefits instead of pushing prices down on development to cut costs.
Users will try to cut corners to reduce the costs from Microsoft and will try to remove money from the software developer's hands.
Microsoft take all the money for their operating system and support and increase costs to developers for training and education to keep up to date due to the complex and hard to maintain systems they have created over the past 25 years.
Microsoft and Oracle make you depend on their internal systems rather than getting third party products that are more flexible and usually much less costly, which local businesses like ours thrive on.
Support local talent like us!
Australians like big stores (Coles mentality) which makes it very hard to find customers even by word of mouth, not my Website. And then there is all the jockeying by the customer as they try to drive down the price to some unviable amount which we fight off bravely!
The big companies' pathetic support leads people to buying their junk then relying on free handouts from little guy's sites like mine to prop them up. This is nearly impossible to change due to lack of incentive and poor competition in the marketplace.
Let's hope that changes as people become more educated and savvy and don't just compete on price.
We support Apple Mac OS X applications such as Adobe InDesign CS2 and also write custom Web-based indexing software to create and upload indexes into InDesign CS2.
We only supply limited support for installation of open source software on Mac OS X Server. We are considering writing software for iPhone mobile applications but we need to get a Mac OS X Leopard on Intel processor to run it first.
See pricing and Terms and Conditions for how we do our costing and manage the project.
Contact us for a quote for a portal to enhance and grow your online business.
Created: 24 Jan 2006 17:57
Last Updated: 24 Sep 2008 17:59